What challenges do researchers encounter in authentically engaging with the field site and academia when certain aspects of their true identities diverge from the established norms within those domains? Using the case of female political scientists who conduct research on gender politics in the Middle East and North Africa, I highlight the ethical, logistical, and epistemological challenges of carrying out research in a politically and socially closed context. Few studies have investigated how the research process and the knowledge it produces are affected by the intertwinement of authoritarianism and patriarchy, and by the researcher’s positionality within this context. This study fills this gap by drawing upon interviews with feminist political scientists who were born and raised in the region but are based in Western academic institutions to examine the impact of authoritarianism, patriarchy, and the researchers’ insider/outsider positionality on the research process. The analysis shows three key findings. First, researching gender politics is a contentious topic that places researchers on the radar of the state. For scholars who are originally from the region, the issue is compounded by the fact that they are sometimes viewed as traitors by the regime in their country of origin, which accuses them of tarnishing the image of the government and scrutinizing its gender policies. Second, within the wider society, the politics of representation also impose certain limitations and expectations on female scholars. Such limitations include gendered restrictions on their access and mobility in the field. Finally, feminist researchers share how the knowledge they produce, which centers social justice demands, is not always valued in the discipline of political science. The article contributes to this discipline by expanding our understanding of the interplay between identity politics, fieldwork practices, and knowledge production in complex political and social settings.

An analysis of the African Union approach to eliminating violence against women shows that while the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol) refined the culture/violence nexus, the subsequent regional frameworks reverted to culture-centered explanations. Tornius’s critical analysis reveals how the relationship between culture and gender discourses has changed over time, entangled with processes of colonialism, decolonization, emergence of African socialisms, the end of the Cold War, and the advent of African feminisms. Articulating gendered violence through undefined ahistorical and apolitical notions of “culture” has real life adverse effects for women through ineffective policy and development interventions.

Scholars have argued that female legislators are more prone to collaborate than their male counterparts. Though collaboration may be more or less evident in particular situations, we seek to more clearly establish the mechanism behind women’s collaborative activity using the framework of marginalization. In this paper, we use cosponsorship data from 74 state legislative chambers from 2011–2014 to analyze collaborative patterns and mobilizing institutions. We find female legislators are more collaborative than men, and that their collaborative advantage strengthens in chambers where women are systematically excluded from leadership positions. The advantage also extends to bipartisan collaboration, but only in less polarized settings with women’s caucuses. Furthermore, our findings imply that as women are integrated into leadership collaboration will actually decline, especially within their own party. We believe these results are important for understanding both the roots of collaborative behavior among female legislators and consequences of chambers that marginalize women from leadership positions.

Can legislation encouraging women’s political involvement impact women’s desire to run for elected office? Eleven states have passed legislation to promote equal gender representation on appointed government boards, and many argue this legislation will also develop a pipeline of women candidates to run for elected office. This paper is the first scholarly work to assess if gender balance legislation (GBL) increases the number of women candidates and women legislators within a state. I use a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences estimator and find very little evidence that GBL significantly impacts women’s representation at the state level. Results are consistent across multiple outcome variables and different model specifications, including two-way fixed effects, generalized synthetic control, and synthetic control models. The insignificant impact of GBL speaks to the need to thoroughly investigate which institutional reforms adequately feed the female candidate pipeline.

Women remain underrepresented in electoral politics compared to their share of the population. Using an original dataset spanning 1975–2019, we examine whether the presence of women in prominent political office leads to an increase in the number of women serving in state legislatures. We define prominence in two ways: the total number of women elected to statewide office and the length of a state’s history of electing women. We find that the prominence effect diverges by party. The election of prominent Democratic women leads to an increase in the proportion of Democratic women state legislators, while the election of Republican women leads to a decrease in the proportion of Republican women state legislators. Rather than serving as role models for women of both parties to enter the political pipeline, electing more women to prominent office is contributing to a greater representational gap between the parties in state legislatures.

The 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic has significantly altered lives across the globe. In the United States, several states attempted to manage the pandemic by issuing stay-at-home orders. In this research note, I examine whether the gender of state policy makers in the executive branch might impact a state's adoption of a stay-at-home order. Using event history analysis, I find that the governor's gender has no impact on the likelihood of a state adopting a stay-at-home order. However, I find that gender plays a significant role for agency heads. Specifically, my analysis shows that states with a female-headed health agency tend to adopt stay-at-home orders earlier than states with a male administrator. These findings shed light on how female leadership in the executive branch may impact public policy regarding COVID-19.

This article examines the limitations of the gender mainstreaming discourse regarding the issue of childcare by women in South Korea, an area of responsibility that was transferred from the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MHW) to the Ministry of Gender Equality (MGE)1 in 2003. Through employing a discursive institutionalism approach, this article articulates that whilst the gender mainstreaming discourse has been interpreted at the surface level of politics, it has been formulated differently behind the scenes due to various policy interests. I argue that the discourse has remained at the level of superficial political rhetoric with underdeveloped understanding about the relationship between childcare and gender, thus retaining a stereotypical view of women as caregivers.

Although many people believe that women are disadvantaged by the electoral process, recent research shows women generally do at least as well as men when they run for office. We investigate the gender dynamics of state supreme court elections. We find evidence that women do enjoy an electoral advantage when they run for judicial office. However, unlike previous work, we find that this advantage is highly contingent on the electoral context. Using an original dataset of competitive judicial elections from 1998 to 2014, we find that women only have a significant vote share advantage when they run as a challenger against a sitting incumbent. The advantage does not apply to women as incumbents or in open seat elections. These findings raise important questions about the interplay of institutional barriers and election aversion for the advancement of women in electoral judicial politics.

In light of the growing scholarship on women's representation in the executive, we examine whether extant theories on the determinants of female ministerial appointments apply to and explain the role of women in the executive in new democracies. We are further interested in better understanding the dynamics of portfolio allocation to female ministers. Given the different meanings that the political left and right carry in new compared with established democracies, we argue that ministerial appointments and portfolio allocations reflect this difference and therefore show diverse results. Presenting data on women ministers in five southeastern European states between 1990 and 2018, we analyze the descriptive representation of women at the highest echelons of political power. We establish that while the standard claim found in the literature that left political parties stage more women and with more progressive views, as shown primarily in scholarship on Western democracies, southeastern European women ministers who are given portfolios traditionally reserved for men are appointed primarily by parties of the right. Moreover, we find little support for the link between legislative and executive representation; rather, we see that the appointment of women ministers is related to the institutionalization level of the parties in power.

This article provides a new measure of state-level attitudes toward gender roles. Our series, gender equality mood, spans from 1972 to 2010 and is the first measure to capture variation in gender-role attitudes across states and over time. The series is created using two leading techniques for opinion estimation: multilevel regression and poststratification and survey aggregation. We conclude by discussing several research areas in which our measure of gender equality mood may be especially useful.

How candidates are selected, such as through nomination by party elites or election by primary voters, potentially influences the underrepresentation of women in political office. Partisan differences suggest that primary voters in right-leaning parties might select fewer female nominees than would their left-leaning counterparts even if both parties' elites are equally likely to select female nominees. This hypothesis is confirmed by an analysis of lieutenant governors in the United States, a position that varies in whether candidates are appointed by party elites or elected by primary voters. In cases where lieutenant-governor candidates are appointed, Democratic and Republican gubernatorial nominees are equally likely to choose female running mates; where primary voters select the lieutenant governor, Republicans are less likely to nominate women.

Prior research has found that descriptive representation by race, ethnicity, or gender increases political action, but it has paid less attention to how the intersection of these identities influences participation. We extend this literature by assessing the effects on voter turnout of collective descriptive representation in U.S. state legislatures on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and their intersections. We argue that members of historically excluded groups respond to the overall composition of their state's legislature. We test this proposition in seven elections (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2012). Our results are consistent with the minority empowerment literature, as overall collective representation does substantially increase turnout among previously excluded groups. However, the impact varies intersectionally. For white women, gender trumps race, as higher collective gender representation, regardless of race or ethnicity, increases voter turnout. For African Americans, race trumps gender, as both black men and women respond most consistently to higher levels of collective racial representation. For Latinos, we find less consistent results, but note a collective ethnic turnout effect for 2002 and 2006. We conclude that collective representation, especially at the intersection of identities, is an important factor influencing levels of turnout among previously excluded groups.

Recent global developments, including the feminization of parliaments and the rise of gender quotas, have transformed the ways in which parties and legislatures operate. This introduction to the special issue ‘Candidate Selection: Parties and Legislatures in a New Era’ puts these recent developments in context, making the case for revisiting the ‘secret garden’ of candidate selection in light of this ‘new era’ in politics. It sets out a critical dialogue between party politics and gender politics scholarship and points to the need for more research on how political parties facilitate or block women’s access to political office. Building on the burgeoning research on gender and political recruitment, it outlines how a gendered and institutional approach allows us to retheorize candidate selection processes and opens up new avenues for empirically examining the pathways prior to election. The article then introduces the papers in this special issue and concludes by evaluating the main implications of gendering analyses of candidate selection and party politics more broadly.

The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of “legal but inaccessible” that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a near-universe of pro- and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.

Over the past several decades, women's office holding at the state level has grown substantially, but there is still a large range of electoral service across the 50 states. In this article, I revisit the most common explanations provided by the literature in helping us understand this variation and assess whether these explanations can be effectively applied to different racial/ethnic groups of female legislators. Using data from a 20-year time span, I find that there are differences between the factors that predict white women and women of color's state legislative presence.

Providing a younger woman's perspective, and born out of the 2006 Cambridge Personal Histories event on 1960s archaeology, this paper struggles to reconcile the panel's characterization of a ‘democratization’ of the field with an apparent absence of women, despite their relative visibility in 1920s–1940s archaeology. Focusing on Cambridge, as the birthplace of processualism, the paper tackles the question ‘where were the women?’ in 1950s–1960s archaeology. A sociohistorical perspective considers the impact of traditional societal views regarding the social role of women; the active gendering of science education; the slow increase of university places for young women; and the ‘marriage bars’ of post-war Britain, crucially restricting women's access to the professions in the era of professionalization, leading to decades of positive discrimination in favour of men. Pointing to the science of male and female archaeologists in 1920s–1930s Cambridge, it challenges ideas of scientific archaeology as a peculiarly post-war (and male) endeavour. The paper concludes that processual archaeology did not seek to democratize the field for women archaeologists.